Kevin Dietsch / UPI / LANDOV

Romney Pal Writes an Ode to Inequality

Mitt Romney no doubt appreciates the million bucks his former Bain Capital protégé Edward Conard has donated to his election SuperPAC. He may not appreciate quite as much the shout-out he gets in the acknowledgements of Conard’s forthcoming book on economic inequality, and why we need more of it — a book that one observer suggests could well become “the most hated book of the year.”

Should We Be “Celebrating” Equal Pay Day Today — or in January?

Jonathan Kitchen / Getty Images

Today is a holiday that no one is interested in celebrating. I’m talking about Equal Pay Day, a sort of anti-holiday marking the sad fact that women still only earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Today, April 17, marks how far into 2012 women would have to work in order to match what men earned in 2011. But critics suggest that this giant pay gap is the result, not of discrimination, but of the different life and career choices made by men and women. Should we really be“celebrating” Equal Pay Day sometime in January?

CEO Pay Up, Average Worker Not so Much

Disney’s Robert Iger got a 45% bigger bonus in 2010 (Phil McCarten/Reuters) Executives in the corner office now make 62 times more than the average worker, and that’s just in bonuses alone. A study done for the Wall Street Journal, found that incentive pay for the chief executive officers of 50 major corporations  jumped 30% [...]

The revolt of the lower upper class begins

Back in 2006, Matt Miller wrote a column for Fortune that seemed very clever to me at the time and now is looking downright prescient. The gist of it: Here’s my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America’s income distribution is the new wild card in public [...]